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🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Battle of the Beams was a period early in the Second World War when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Etymology

Zenzizenzizenzic is an obsolete form of mathematical notation representing the eighth power of a number (that is, the zenzizenzizenzic of x is x⁸), dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th-century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte (although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike); he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly".

At the time Recorde proposed this notation, there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers other than squares and cubes. The root word for Recorde's notation is zenzic, which is a German spelling of the medieval Italian word censo, meaning "squared". Since the square of a square of a number is its fourth power, Recorde used the word zenzizenzic (spelled by him as zenzizenzike) to express it. Some of the terms had prior use in Latin "zenzicubicus", "zensizensicus" and "zensizenzum". Similarly, as the sixth power of a number is equal to the square of its cube, Recorde used the word zenzicubike to express it; a more modern spelling, zenzicube, is found in Samuel Jeake's Logisticelogia. Finally, the word zenzizenzizenzic denotes the square of the square of a number's square, which is its eighth power: in modern notation,

${\displaystyle x^{8}=\left(\left(x^{2}\right)^{2}\right)^{2}.}$

Recorde proposed three mathematical terms by which any power (that is, index or exponent) greater than 1 could be expressed: zenzic, i.e. squared; cubic; and sursolid, i.e. raised to a prime number greater than three, the smallest of which is five. Sursolids were as follows: 5 was the first; 7, the second; 11, the third; 13, the fourth; etc.

Therefore, a number raised to the power of six would be zenzicubic, a number raised to the power of seven would be the second sursolid, hence bissursolid (not a multiple of two and three), a number raised to the twelfth power would be the "zenzizenzicubic" and a number raised to the power of ten would be the square of the (first) sursolid. The fourteenth power was the square of the second sursolid, and the twenty-second was the square of the third sursolid.

Curiously, Jeake's text appears to designate a written exponent of 0 as being equal to an "absolute number, as if it had no Mark", thus using the notation x⁰ to refer to x alone, while a written exponent of 1, in his text, denotes "the Root of any number", thus using the notation x¹ to refer to what is now known to be x^0.5.

The word, as well as the system, is obsolete except as a curiosity; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has only one citation for it. As well as being a mathematical oddity, it survives as a linguistic oddity: zenzizenzizenzic has more Zs than any other word in the OED.

Samuel Jeake the Younger gives zenzizenzizenzizenzike (the square of the square of the square of the square, or 16th power) in a table in A Compleat Body of Arithmetick:

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Anthroponymy

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymous adjective Gaussian is pronounced GOWSS-ee-ən.

🔗 Time 🔗 Switzerland

Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of "Beat" watches.

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, for example @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing ​²⁴⁸⁄₁₀₀₀ of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ, IPA: [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa], chit-chat) is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total). At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.

Inspired by their desire to "talk less, show more," Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) created PechaKucha in February 2003. It was a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, their experimental event space in Roppongi, and to enable young designers to meet, show their work, and exchange ideas in 6 minutes 40 seconds.

In 2004, cities in Europe began hosting PK Nights and days, followed over the years by hundreds of others. As of April 2019, PKNs had been held in more than 1,142 cities worldwide. More than 3 million people have attended a PK Night.

PechaKucha is a registered trademark of PechaKucha, Inc.

In January 2018, PK's Astrid Klein, Mark Dytham, and Sean Smyth established PK, Inc. to create software to expand the PK platform.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing

Francesco Vianello (30 August 1952 – 3 May 2009), better known by his nickname Fravia (sometimes +Fravia or Fravia+), was a software reverse engineer, and hacker, known for his web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. He is also known for his work on steganography. He had taught on subjects such as data mining, anonymity, stalking, klebing, advertisement reversing and ad-busting.

Fravia spoke six languages (including Latin) and had a degree in the history of the early Middle Ages. He was an expert in linguistics-related informatics. For five years he made available a large quantity of material related to reverse engineering through his website, which also hosted the advice of reverse engineering experts, known as reversers, who provided tutorials and essays on how to hack software code as well as advice related to the assembly and disassembly of applications, and software protection reversing.

Fravia was a professor at the High Cracking University (+HCU), founded by Old Red Cracker (+ORC), a legendary figure in reverse engineering, to conduct research into Reverse Code Engineering. The addition of the "+" sign in front of the nickname of a reverser signified membership in the +HCU. His website was known as "+Fravia's Pages of Reverse Engineering" and he used it to challenge programmers as well as the wider society to "reverse engineer" the "brainwashing of a corrupt and rampant materialism". In its heyday, his website was receiving millions of visitors per year and its influence was "widespread".

His web presence dates from 1995 when he first got involved in research related to reverse code engineering (RCE). In 2000 he changed his focus and concentrated on advanced internet search methods and the reverse engineering of search engine code.

His websites "www.fravia.com" and "www.searchlores.org" contained a large amount of specialised information related to data mining. His website "www.searchlores.org" has been called a "very useful instrument for searching the web", and his "www.fravia.com" site has been described as "required reading for any spy wanting to go beyond simple Google searches."

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Africa 🔗 Greece 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Bulgaria 🔗 Africa/Libya 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Non-tropical storms 🔗 Weather/Floods 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Africa/Egypt 🔗 Weather/Tropical cyclones

Storm Daniel, also known as Cyclone Daniel, was the deadliest Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone ever recorded as well as the deadliest weather event during 2023. It caused catastrophic damage in Libya and also affected parts of southeastern Europe. Forming as a low-pressure system around 4 September 2023, the storm affected Greece, Bulgaria and also Turkey with extensive flooding. The storm then organized as a Mediterranean Low and was designated as Storm Daniel, in which it soon acquired quasi-tropical characteristics (TLC) and moved toward the coast of Libya, where it caused catastrophic flooding before degenerating into a remnant low. The storm was the result of an Omega block, as a high-pressure zone became sandwiched between two zones of low pressure, the isobars shaping a Greek letter Ω.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (aka RBIL, x86 Interrupt List, MS-DOS Interrupt List or INTER) is a comprehensive list of interrupts, calls, hooks, interfaces, data structures, CMOS settings, memory and port addresses, as well as processor opcodes and special function registers for x86 machines from the 1981 IBM PC up to 2000, most of it still applying to IBM PC compatibles today.

🔗 Fencing

Dueling scars (German: Schmisse) have been seen as a "badge of honour" since as early as 1825. Known variously as "Mensur scars", "the bragging scar", "smite", "Schmitte" or "Renommierschmiss", dueling scars were popular amongst upper-class Austrians and Germans involved in academic fencing at the start of the 20th century. Being a practice amongst university students, it was seen as a mark of their class and honour, due to the status of dueling societies at German and Austrian universities at the time, and is an early example of scarification in European society. The practice of dueling and the associated scars was also present to some extent in the German military.

Foreign tourists visiting Germany in the late 19th century were shocked to see the students, generally with their Studentcorps, at major German universities such as Heidelberg, Bonn, or Jena with facial scars – some older, some more recent, and some still wrapped in bandages.

The sport of academic fencing at the time was very different from modern fencing using specially developed swords. The so-called Mensurschläger (or simply Schläger, "hitter") existed in two versions. The most common weapon is the Korbschläger with a basket-type guard. In some universities in the eastern part of Germany, the so-called Glockenschläger is in use which is equipped with a bell-shaped guard. The individual duels between students, known as Mensuren, were somewhat ritualised. In some cases, protective clothing was worn, including padding on the arm and an eye guard.

The culture of dueling scars was mainly common to Germany and Austria, to a lesser extent some central European countries and briefly at places such as Oxford and some other elite universities. German military laws permitted men to wage duels of honor until World War I. During the Third Reich the Mensur was prohibited at all Universities following the partyline.

Within the duel, it was seen as ideal and a way of showing courage to be able to stand and take the blow, as opposed to inflicting the wound. It was important to show one's dueling prowess, but also that one was capable of taking the wound that was inflicted.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Corruption

State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage.

The term was first used by the World Bank in 2000 to describe certain Central Asian countries making the transition from Soviet communism, where small corrupt groups used their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making in order to strengthen their own economic positions.

Allegations of state capture have led to protests against the government in Bulgaria in 2013–2014 and in 2020–2021 and Romania in 2017, and have caused an ongoing controversy in South Africa beginning in 2016. Turkey is considered as a post-2002 example of state capture. The term has also been used against Elon Musk by critics of U.S. President Donald Trump.